Waking along a paved ribbon in a park, you are strolling on a shared path with the scene gently jiggling as it unfolds into your open gaze, trees, sky, grass, grey footway, when a bicyclist races past going in the opposite direction. You see in a flash only a helmeted head plugged with earphones and eyes slit against the wind, face rock-like against the raking afternoon light, and gone in an instant. That meditative face is taken to be the bearer of a consciousness turned inward, intensified and yet utterly incommensurate with your own, time, space, thought, experience compacted, alien. It is an encounter purified of all personal projections, pure objective event in which there seem to be two starkly distinguished consciousnesses in play, one stationary and the other passing through it like a comet. But in reality there is only one, the whole thing is 'constructed' within the field of your own awareness which effortlessly manufactures an objectification of itself via the idea of the other. There seem to be insides and outsides, but it is all one thing carrying with it whatever it is that makes the cut between them appear to be real. You are within but it is not a spatial within, not the within in the picture, the within of the picture, of all such pictures. It all happens so fast, the within is faster, more immediate, faster than any seeker who would look for it. 

In the thick of a mood the sense of self becomes swollen but loses almost all transparency. How is this experienced? First as a colouring, as if the light of awareness has been suffused with a dark tint, nominally blue or brown, but the precise colour matters less than the fact that it is an affection of looking. If the way to loosen it is to 'get some perspective', then this is undermined since the contamination pervades, or seems to pervade the very organ of sight. Second as a heaviness, as if your ability to move has been weighed down, as if your feet have sunk into a mire, hence the metaphors of the slough or swamp. This is an affection of the will, a sense of constraint, a frustrated desire to get free. As if you keep pulling to get away but find your efforts resisted and overmatched. Then there is an intellectual pessimism in that the frame of understanding you had built up which had seemed to assign a place and boundaries to the negative, a healthy respect in effect, proves to be unable to prevail over larger frames which ironise all its certainties. Finally, the very 'I' is affected, with all its dimensions of freedom suspended it reflects in its heart only the will to this state, as if that were its choice, as if it were the very expression of its being. This is what one least wants to look at, to talk about, but it is essential to find out exactly what it is.

Without a guiding idea there seems to be only the running-off of expired potentiality, a mass of sentience like static, resistant to any form. Something has to occupy even an empty stage and so it is this, like a nostalgia unattached to a past, to memory, or to time beyond the dust and drapery of afternoon light. The self is dug into this steady inward motion, half-buried, but entirely present, but too irritable for comfort. The world could perish and this would stay just as it is. It's what reasserts itself after the events have gone by, after the identifications have dropped away, when everything that could be surrendered has been surrendered, when the soul has gone on holiday. Sooner or later you have to face it, bear up without a face to look out blinking in the raw light over the sea, and without words or body, without love or desire.

Some of your basic assumptions may be true and others surely are way off the mark, but you can't distinguish among them and so you try to push them all to their limits to see which ones will be able to survive. If you came to what is known as a 'moment of truth' it would be immediately evident which of these beliefs imposed themselves on you from the very nature of things and which ones you had quietly been sustaining from other motives such as the 'sunken cost fallacy' or the magical idea that prolonging the quest serves to prolong the seeker. Whether a moment of truth of this kind ever arrives is immaterial to the reflection that on some level you know perfectly well what is true and what is error but that your will to separate them is impure. Or it might be that this idea about your ideas is precisely one of those equivocal assumptions? When you see up close how you rely on certain almost unchanging notions of reality which form the basis of the life you live and make that life what it is, and how these notions are confabulations taken on out of no self-interest or rational calculation, that they are at best 'foreign dust', with a sharp shock you are brought back to the forgotten self you have always been.

A photograph is legible because you are outside the point of view implicit in its view. The place from where the scene is seen is what makes it possible to see, but the seer is not located in the virtual space that contains the view and the point of view. The point of view belonging to the image is subtly taken on, it is agreed to be entered into, it is assumed almost automatically, and when it comes about the scene is discovered, and not uniquely. If there weren't that freedom in the choice of taking it on, or of refusing it, then it couldn't be what it is. It is just so with embodied consciousness, each moment experienced by the subject that is you, a subject entered into, implicitly assumed in order to bring the event about. A three dimensional world can only realised from a four dimensional spatialisation, one not limited to point of view precisely so that internal points of view can be freely assumed. What makes this reality work is that the point of view can keep changing, keep being reassumed in new formations, guided by sense, not just in a bundle of inter-related physical spaces, but in all the forms of connection required by first- second- and third-person experiences.

Even if there was some insoluble kernel in these moments of consciousness that said they had to belong to someone, that still wouldn't mean it was you that was meant. Take it that there is no such kernel but that it is because of a polyphony of conscious moments which reciprocally articulate, some pointing to the object, others pointing to the pointing, and still others creatively synthesising the points of view, weaving them into a tapestry, a geology. It's not a single arrow pointing but a complex arrangement jury-rigged of multiple "tents" and "ins" which only on being questioned resolve into "intents". It's only when looked at side-on that you seem to be in there somewhere, fully exposed to being, as if existing irreducibly beyond sense, answering to the question that all experience struggles to express in ecstatic finality. It doesn't matter where that "I am" appears in this, as object or subject-object, only that it appears, so that it might as well be the whole show; it is the whole show divinely conjugating the is. 

Experience without an experiencer, or the experiencer entirely absorbed into the experiencing. Narrative and desire in abeyance, a sort of suspension within the flow of time, this seems like the state under the state, possibility without choice, without any reason to choose. The mind fallen silent and true so that any position would be a betrayal of simplicity, requiring nothing and offering nothing. It could go on forever, it is at no distance from anywhere because it refrains from measuring the gap. Accept all, subside into all, nothing is at stake. Take a deep breath, breathe in the night, the cool, the dark.

How dull, flat and stale life can seem. The conditions of this are what you look at. They are co-ordinated, self-evident and so of course you are their complement. Remedies come to mind, which come down to varying the conditions in this way and that and you dwell on these, projecting them, imagining them. Or else you recall other occasions that were similar, other remedies that ran their course, changes that intervened, for better or for worse. It becomes a matter of what needs to be done, of the power or want of power to conceive it, to do it. You give credence to a self that is of the same degree of reality as the conditions you project, which are only thoughts. It is all unreal, an invitation to a futile expense of spirit, rather than to note that what apprehends these conditions is the very presence they seem to deny. The impressions arise and sink down into the heart of experience but you imagine that they terminate, that they are lodged, at the level of a self cognate with all the conceived conditions, the whole historical, geographical, sociological, personal mass, or mess, of them. But no, they don't stop there, that level, that chute is a part of what arises, they sink down out of sight into the veritable witness, the experiencer, here and now as ever, formless, alive, serene, indifferent, perfectly satisfied with things as they are.

In spite of what you take it to be, and you take it to be so many things, incessantly varying formations driven by open determinations, it is what it is. It is not consciousness, but consciousness is it. Consciousness is an idea, it is a thing you speak about when you speak about what speaks, it comes and goes, it is imagined. Consciousness is a word spoken by what is, which is not different from consciousness, is what imagines consciousness as what imagines. It is, consciousness doubts it, consciousness doubts, is the idea of the possibility of doubting and the idea of its impossibility. The impossibility of doubt is not discovered at the end, it is at the beginning, always, everywhere, prior to consciousness. 

What appears is what changes; appearance is change, but that which appears is constancy through change, and what sees is the constancy that does not change. The mind extracts constancies out of continual change. If the eye is tricked to remove the effect of saccades then the world vanishes, but if it is not possible to abstract an underlying constancy then the flux does not register, it passes through the field of attention as through a sieve. We know process in things which change as they are changed, and so it seems that what we are is also process and we build images of ourselves out of such processes. We track it with a vengeance. Experience seems to be the running of one process against another, the faster against the slower, harmonics and dissonances, but as rich and fascinating as these are there can be no decisive separation of seer and seen in such interplay. If it were so, if subjectivity were an effect, or an affect, then it would not be anchored anywhere, would be serenely decentred and of no stake in the game, would not need to be so jealously phenomenalised. The scandal is that everything appears because it does not appear, everything moves because it is unmoved, that everything matters because it does not.

It seems natural to think of experience as happening in time, as if time with its flow were the self-evident if not quite understood medium of being and experience were contained in it - just as you experience the experience of an other as a special kind of event in the world, watching their face, hearing their voice, their breath, their heartbeat. So your own experience seems to be an event in the world, and certainly you can plan for it in a way, say by buying a ticket for a show or making a date, and it comes to you out of the future and then it is happening and then it is over and it recedes into the past leaving a few glittering memories behind. But this sort of time is only the form your experience takes, it doesn't precede experience like a blank page to be filled, you have no notion of it, no way of gauging it outside of experience. The problem is that this little bright bead of the present is always the same and everything is experienced through it, and so your past is not the ribbon fading away in the distance but this same bright bead shining with a different set of events just as immediately now and just as immediately recognised as all you are and can ever be. Lived time bears no resemblance to your notion of time, the same word ought not to be used for a reality so unthinkable.

If all experience is experience-of then the notion of a subject is an inference from the given structure of experience, and so is secondary to objectivity. This is certainly the case of the subject that is sought. Can you then assert that there is seeking? That there is experiencing? Without flipping the whole thing over into the priority of the subjective pole? The mirror image of the same question. There cannot be an object without a subject doing it, there cannot be a subject without the doing of an object. Why doing? What is the reality that is never an object? What kind of discrimination can pull these apart? Not one that is modeled on experience. Something else then? The thing vanishes in smoke time and time again, but just as surely reappears. What is behind these intuitions? Why can they never be reasoned out?

Experience has the sense - both as meaning and as direction - of falling short of adequation, as if it is in search of something which it never finds, the self being nothing but the search for self. Ordinary experience, or better, the way of the world, is a pretended acceptance of this condition and a redirection of the quest towards a series of temporary pseudo-fulfillments, known as happiness or pleasure or even ecstasy, but which never for long shake-off the sense that the point has been missed, that the true life is elsewhere - the true life being a complete and all-embracing self-possession, what some call absolute consciousness, or just being God. Despite the faith we moderns place in Cartesianism of various forms, it is impossible to picture this self-adequation as the necessarily prior state, but it is possible to conceive of it in this way. Broadly, the condition aimed at can be taken as prior to experience, in the sense that positive experience is brought about by some sort of clinamen or symmetry-breaking which spins out of control, unable to recover itself; or else it can be taken as a future state, as what everything is tending towards, so that our temporary deifications are like puzzle-pieces to be finally assembled into a permanent and seamless epiphany, or eclosion; or else again, in a third possibility, we can posit that perfect self-adequation is ever-present but unrecognised, the failure to recognise it being a sort of parallax effect, an illusion without substance like the Vedantic snake which proves to be a rope. These understandings, individually or together in a suspension or superposition, underly the experience of experience, and deserve to be critically scrutinised if only a point outside them all could be located.

The idealism of esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, is as unthinking in its own way as any objectivism in presuming that the act of perceiving is self-evident, is as it appears. As if it is enough to gesture at the appearance of appearance. The subject of perception is not perceived and therefore is not according to this teaching, and yet the perceiving is and must then itself be perceived and so on. There is an absurdity in this which corresponds to the de-realisation which dogs all idealisms like a bad smell. Perceiving, which here stands for cognition is general, is understood implicitly as having a transitive nature: something is conveyed to something. The mind abhors a duality and strives to bring the all into a single embrace in whatever it insists upon as the basis. The mind is a theory of the mind, what experiences is neither.

The zero-one see-saw. It is as if you embody the balance between the weights of the objective world and the Subject, between phenomena and noumenon, when there can be no balance between such two. Ordinary reality places all the weight on the objective side, since the subjective side seems a vague and shadowy thing, an elusive 'might be' that you cannot entirely give up on, but that hardly counts against the immense ponderability of the phenomenal panorama. You strive to maintain some sort of balance, aware that it is mostly in bad faith, a sort of strained saving of the appearances. But this is because you never seriously consider what it is that is actually experiencing, or Who it is that sees or knows. The reality of this side is simply incredible, a blind spot, but more like a black hole, super-massive. Rightly conceived it infinitely outweighs the phenomenal, no question of a balance at all. The see-saw seems to teeter only because you fail to realise this. But for whom is this even an issue? It can only be for the one who thinks he is struggling to hold the subjective up against the overwhelming weight of the objective, all those evidences, as big as trucks, as mountains or moons. He needs to see the absurdity of all that. One cubic millimetre of the Subject weighs more than all the galaxies. There are no appearances to save - appearances to whom??

 

The writer gives shape to an inchoate problem inseparable from their subjectivity. In the degree of their skill and honesty they are able to give objective form and freedom to the question so that in every essential way it answers itself. But for all their ability they can only asymptotically approach the true underlying question. So however well they succeed they always fail. Or success seems to be no more than refining the question. The writing cannot stop because as soon as one construction is finished the apparent solution drops away and the question re-emerges in a yet more pressing form. The reader can see both question and answer, they can see what the writer must always fail to see, which is that the question has been completely answered, the asymptotic failure, the falling short, does not escape them but appears under the aspect of comedy: what is being looked for is right there under the nose of the seeker. While the same gap appears to the writer as tragedy, as the inevitable inadequacy of things, even if they might pretend to readerly satisfaction. It would all be a gift to the reader if only the question were the reader's question, which it never is, or only asymptotically so. The text is like a two-way mirror in which each party sees only the other's reflection.

To turn and see experience as act from the inside out is a kind of semantic inversion whereby you become aware of the constituted nature of whatever previously was merely received. It is an unzipping of the world which seems like a critical revelation, an opening onto an alienated freedom. Once begun there is no holding it back, it undoes everything and yet it leaves you oddly paralysed, at the intersection of giant formations in time, deeper and perhaps more sinister than all identified matters. This may be nothing more than a kind of post-modern sublime, a shift in the historical fault lines of the self, which is always in advance of its understanding, but once in play it is hard to resist its glamour. When defiantly directed outwards this kind of thinking loses all of its thrust towards truth, its original motivation, and becomes endless mannerism. It is then, like so much in art, a spiritual tool misused, the latest form of 'spilt religion', in Hulme's memorable phrase. 

The shape of things seems to be something like this: that there is a vast, furnished and peopled external world about which there is no direct knowledge surrounding a thick sensitive layer, the body, which partially appears in that world but for the most part is known internally. This body is hollow and surrounds a shadowy realm of thought and feeling which is known almost perfectly, in that its being is nothing more than its being-known, and its being-known is both bodily feeling and abstract reference. What ever it is that you are is somehow entirely installed in this inner world of thoughts and feelings but remains hidden within it, and is only known through its interactions with the other parts. This inner self is entirely a creature of meanings as these are expressed through the vastly complex interactions of body and world, and in particular through a kind of imperative urgency that takes form as wishes and desires, as vivid emotional responses that ripple through the body. There is no clear boundary between the body and the world, or between thought and the body. The senses which mediate their interactions are neither wholly in the world nor wholly in the body, the two being only imagined to be separable. In this working picture some elements take the form of objects with more or less constancy and other complementary elements take the form of meanings, desires, ideas, marked as subjective and lacking in constancy. The closer matters are to the ultimate driving force the more abstract and diaphanous they seem, but there is no reason to accept this valuation, no reason why it shouldn't be reversed.

As it goes on here in this moment is there a world in which you find yourself engaged, thus and so? Is that the best description, the long habit doesn't prove it so? Writing, reading, sitting, tracking, doing, in the midst of things, with contention or without, or questions, with emotions, background music, or without, drinking water from a glass, wondering what is possible, what others are capable of, what you are capable of, in the slow turning of the day. Is it you that is most real or the world? The centre sliding between poles but never fully attached. It goes this way, an adventure not yet ended, but which has to end, why? Who said that there was you and the world, that thinking this way is the way it has to go? It has to go. Nothing is sure, what you call your life is an essay in being, is not being, is in question, answered contentiously, a piling up of premises that you launch against other premises, piled up other ways, in the same way. The emotions or feelings telling a different story than the words, something just out of reach. There is no place for you in your world and no room for such a world in you, as if there had to be at least two things, the object demanding a subject, the subject demanding an object, when there can only be one, and not even one. Name and form, you and the world, the witness and the play, not even one.

If you watch a film or read a novel then it easy to see that the characters who seem so real are just made up out of a few moving shadows or squiggles on a page, that the thick subjectivity they seem to possess and in which you participate is produced by your automatic propensity to read meaning into them. This simple insight ought to recoil back on you so that you see how distinct the richly detailed predicament you find yourself in is from the sparse actuality on which it is founded. That this doesn't happen is because the idea that whatever it is, you must be doing it, is so pervasive, because this idea really has no graspable alternative or antithesis. You say that the problem is identification, but in doing so you have already fallen into the trap, as if to say that there is someone who identifies, as if  (the idea of) some one made obvious sense. You affirm the transitive nature of identification because there are no words to render just how flat this all is, how absolutely present. It's not freedom or bondage, if there is no one for whom these alternatives exist, but more than that there could never be anyone who could even be mistaken about them. There's no half-grasping this, it's either all or nothing, and there's no path to get there from here. 

Once admitted that things are not what they seem, that the waking world is as fabulous as the dream world, then the boundary between inside and outside dissolves and everything collapses. But at the same time it all stays exactly as it was, only more so. This is the burden of the old formula, 'an X is not an X, therefore it is an X'. What was missing, what was preventing the X from being just what it was, was just what it seemed to be. You wanted things to be only tickets to themselves, yourself just to be a ticket to yourself that you were waiting to realise. The waiting, the wanting, was your hedge, a margin of provisionality, an insufficiency, perhaps a little breathing space too, but also the angel at the gate of Eden. So in the same way, desire, suffering no lack, because the lack collapses with everything else, is not desire, and therefore it is desire without object or subject and without process or result. 

Idealism is perhaps a matter of adding something to experience, an extra thought ingredient, a dimensionality sustained by the most delicate acrobatics of thought, one that subtly alters its frame. It is an exhausing but brilliant virtuosity, a performance meant to impress. Here though it is something else, a matter of subtracting something from the frame of experience, the result of the rigorously pursued observation that there is something redundant, obtuse and persistent that has become attached to the way experience is framed. This pervasive tincture is less than a belief, but can be indicated in a Harding-esque way as if it were the faith in the independent existence of the unseen reality of your own head. Let the idea of your head be as it may be and look to the leaning on it, to the displacement of its centre of gravity into a mysterious elsewhere. It acts like a catalyst, doing no work itself, being empty of positive meaning, and yet transforming all that it touches. Above all don't do phenomenology, but simply see the reduction as a mistaken duplication of the serenely obvious.

Prismatic subjectivity is when there is a guiding thought which renders the events of the inner life according to a way of treating itself as object, like a texture brought out by a certain colour and angle of light. It is a vein of thought, of strict discovery peeling back a layer of the ever-present. You want to overhear the mind's conversation with itself, to provide for yourself that reassuring multiplication of positions, a sociality independent of sociality but which proves that it is contained. But then there is the stage in which all of this fails, when the life or energy has drained out of it and the crystalline sharpness of prisms softens into slow floating clouds of warm grey mindstuff. This is the point at which thought subsides into dreaming, at which the surface melts into a watery space and that other mind that has been waiting at the edge the whole time is released into play. It doesn't borrow from your energy but takes up with its own where the day leaves off, it is yours too but there is a kind of fear at the transition, stepping over the border, the surrender of the day, its failure and incompletion handed over, now to be cradled in that other truer life.   

What and that are two incompatible directions of measurement which apply to the unchanging mystery of presence. The thing, the cause, la chose, is constant outside of all experience but the apparatus which realises it can take these two directions, call them essence and being: I am what I am, or I am that I am. It rarely or never happens that you find yourself in a pure state, but if you are most clearly what you are, what you happen to be, then your being is smeared out over the broadest scope of the world, and if you draw close to realising the pure event of being then what you are is scattered over all possibilities. It is the indeterminacy of these categories that makes for the unresolvable displacement at the heart of your experience of yourself, at the same time as you know yourself to be one beyond all sense of personal identity and necessarily without being able to encompass or express this oneness in any way. The mystery is not really a mystery at all, it's only that the categories by which you actualise contain this strange incompatibility which itself follows from their absolute efficiency.

Creaturely knowingness you are. You are what you are, your knowingness does not go straight through, it tends towards its end without knowing it. This is what it means to be creaturely. You have thought in your gift, you didn't make it, but it is yours, a gift from the beginning and the end, and so knowingness takes form as thought. Thought is form not knowing itself, without a self to know, pure instrumentality that you tend through, and through. Using thought is generating thought, it overflows, dazzling like a spring, and explosive, spring-stuff, thought, delight, epicycles, ribbons and spirals and clouds passing over clouds passing over the sun and moon and other stars. Form is the sighing of knowingness, it is what it is and it is not what it is. It is not form, form tends, tending is tender, is love, going straight through but taking its time, in intervals that open in the creaturely gift of love of knowing, the other and one and you and you and the gift giving itself and other and sun and moon and other stars.